世論 What Japan Thinks

I run an ad blocker, although I keep Google ads live (and I hope you do too!) as they are mostly pretty lightweight and quick to load, and most importantly usually text-only. I do very occasionally click search ads but don’t really find them that useful, and this recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and performed by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into web search showed that a lot of Japanese do too.

Demographics

Over the 3rd and 4th of March 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.3% of the sample was male, 3.6% in their teens, 15.2% in their twenties, 37.6% in their thirties, 25.8% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, 5.8% in their sixties, and 3.0% aged seventy or older.

Note that because many television and print advertisements feature search keywords rather than URLs, rather than engage in SEO activities to naturally boost a product’s home page the companies buy advertising space on the major search engines, thus, perhaps, Japanese people pay more attention to the sponsored links.

From what I’ve heard, if you want to advertise Google of course gives you the largest audience, but Yahoo!’s customers are more click-happy and keen to buy, although Yahoo! has a higher minimum cost per click charge. MSN/Windows Live seems actually to be the best from an overall package point of view, but looking at the results below, if you’re trying to sell in Japan you won’t see much business!
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With Japanese mobile cameras capable of scanning QR codes and doing OCR of text, and with television and print advertisements frequently featuring search keywords, and even RFID-enabled advertising terminals, it’s a refreshing change to see the pictured decidedly low-tech advertisement.

The katakana script text reads “Daburyu Daburyu Daburyu Dotto Obamasen Dotto Comu”, or in plain English www.obamasen.com, an advertisement for the Obama railway line running alongside the Japan Sea on the northern shores of Hyogo prefecture, not some cryptic message of support for Sen. Obama, the US presidential candidate!

Since this blog, like many others, and like real life too, is littered with adverts, it might be useful to look at how the Japanese perceive advertising. This survey from goo Research attempted to address this issue. This survey was carried out amongst 2,147 people residing in Tokyo and the surrounding prefectures of Saitama, Kanagawa and Chiba. It was performed as a real time survey using mobile phones, whatever that means. I think it means they just phoned mobile numbers from their survey group at random, so people could answer about their current surroundings.
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